‘From another galaxy’: Hunt makes few friends in Surrey town with £100k remarks

Some residents said they understood what Jeremy Hunt was trying to say about £100,000 not being a huge salary given how expensive housing in Surrey. Photograph: Martin Godwin/The Guardian

“I felt like I must be from another galaxy when I heard it,” Merve Topaloğlu says of the chancellor Jeremy Hunt’s suggestion that collecting £100,000 a year is “not a huge salary”.

“I can’t imagine how anyone could say £100,000 is not a huge amount,” adds the 34-year-old former Turkish reporter, who runs the Journalist, a cafe on Godalming’s High Street right in the heart of Hunt’s Surrey constituency. “The annual profit from my whole cafe isn’t close to £100,000.”